Demands for higher data rates for mobile services are steadily increasing. At the same time modern mobile communication systems, as 3rd Generation (3G) systems and 4th Generation (4G) systems, provide enhanced technologies, which enable higher spectral efficiencies and allow for higher data rates and cell capacities. Moreover, new services and service types are being continuously introduced, such that the range and variety of services and/or applications in current and future mobile networks are expanding.
These services or applications, which may be run on modern smartphones, for example, typically have quite diverse data traffic characteristics. For example, some services/applications may be characterized or classified as background traffic. Such background traffic may, for example, be characterized by long periods of traffic inactivity (e.g. several minutes), where no user plane data is exchanged between a mobile terminal, which may also be referred to as User Equipment (UE) according to the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) terminology, and the wireless network it is attached to, followed by relatively short bursts of traffic activity (few second), wherein data is exchanged between the mobile terminal and the wireless network. Other popular services/applications include instant messaging between multiple mobile terminals, wherein instant messaging may be characterized by a moderate period of data packet inter arrival time (e.g. few seconds) and low data rates (e.g. 30-100 Bytes/s in average). Mobile terminals in current and future wireless networks may have enabled diverse data application and most of the time will only be communicating with the network for delivery or reception of user traffic originating from diverse data applications. In order to handle a large number of mobile terminals with diverse data application, a wireless communication network's Radio Resource Management (RRM) could take into account the respective application characteristics.
In various wireless communication networks, a mobile terminal stays in a so-called idle mode until a request to establish an RRC (Radio Resource Control) connection is transmitted to the wireless network. In idle mode a Radio Network has no information on an individual mobile terminal, and can only address, for example, all mobile terminals in a radio cell or all mobile terminals monitoring a paging occasion. A mobile terminal may transit from idle mode to connected mode when an RRC connection is established, wherein the RRC connection may be defined as a point-to-point bidirectional connection between RRC peer entities in the mobile terminal and the wireless network, as, for example, the UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) Terrestrial Radio Access Network (UTRAN) or the evolved UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network (eUTRAN) which is the air interface of 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) Long Term Evolution (LTE).
For example, the wireless network may keep a mobile terminal is RRC connected mode while configuring RRC-connected-mode-long Discontinuous Reception (DRX) functions which enable the mobile terminal to turn off the downlink receiver while not monitoring the established RRC connection. The DRX procedure allows a battery power saving at the mobile terminal. Thereby, the mobile terminal and the network negotiate phases or time-intervals in which data transfer occurs. During other times the mobile terminal may turns its receiver off in order to enter a low power state. For example, the network may configure a DRX period to match data traffic or packet inter-arrival times of the diverse applications. An application or data traffic trace is normally built up over time at the wireless network. Therefore, it may take some time to identify the data traffic profile of a particular mobile terminal and, hence, configure the radio resources (e.g.: DRX configuration) after an RRC connection has been established for the service/application. Mobile terminals being in RRC connected mode create signaling traffic in particular due to the mobile terminal's mobility (e.g. handover signaling, measurement reports, etc.). Additionally, a large number of connected mobile terminals create network signaling. A server capacity requirement for handling the signaling traffic also increases with the number of connected mobile terminals. Therefore, mobile terminal battery consumption, radio resource configuration and signaling load should be carefully taken into account when making a decision to keep a mobile terminal in RRC connected mode.
The network may release the RRC connection of a mobile terminal if a so-called dormancy timer running at the network expired for the mobile terminal after a given period of data traffic inactivity, or, due to the network's decision to release the connection. For example, a mobile terminal may initiate a RRC connection for a Voice over IP (VoIP) call and upon the ending of the VoIP call the network may release the RRC connection of the mobile terminal. Releasing the RRC connection for mobile terminals with frequent data traffic will lead to frequent idle-connected transitions, which may lead to a significant amount of network signaling.
Even though the network may trace a mobile terminal's data traffic and may have knowledge on the data traffic characteristics, any mobile terminal specific information at the radio network is removed upon, i.e. shortly before or after, the RRC connection release. That is to say, if a UE establishes a new connection after a period of inactivity, even though the mobile terminal's supported software applications have not been changed between a RRC connection release and a subsequent RRC connection setup, the network does not have any knowledge of the mobile terminal's traffic characteristic and, hence, an optimal configuration of radio resources is not possible until the network traces the user traffic again in order to identify the traffic profile.